Since we launched Messenger Platform less than six months ago, millions of people in more than 200 countries have been engaging with businesses on Messenger each day in new and exciting ways—from better customer service, to more sophisticated brand and commerce experiences and receiving news from trusted sources.

Developers and businesses have built more than 30,000 bots for Messenger, we’ve on-boarded over 34,000 developers and we’ve just recently updated our Platform policy to improve engagement and retention for interactions between people and businesses on Messenger. It’s still early days, but we have had great feedback from the developer community about the success of many of the experiences they’ve launched. We believe the potential for the Messenger Platform is huge, and we continue to invest in making it better for developers to build and create.

Our belief in the potential for Messenger for businesses and developers is why we’re excited to also announce that we’re launching Messenger Platform v1.2, an incremental but significant update that offers more ways to drive engagement, build retention and facilitate meaningful relationships with people.

On the ability for brands to accept payments from users directly via Messenger—which is currently available only in the U.S., in beta form–the social network wrote:

Moving forward, we are also simplifying the payment and checkout experience in order to reduce the overall friction between wanting something and getting it. People can use their payment information already stored on Messenger and Facebook to check out faster in Messenger threads. You’ll see us rolling out a few new commerce and payments experiences, including:

We’re kicking off the beginning of messages with payments that will allow businesses to sell products and services directly to customers in Messenger. Customers can check out with a few easy clicks, without ever leaving the Messenger app. Merchants will be able to on-board with a simple self-serve onboarding flow. Developers can get more details here. Messages with payments—as well as payments through the enhanced Messenger mobile web view—will be available for some developers as a closed beta. Businesses and developers can apply to be included in this beta while we’re working to roll out this capability more broadly.

Today we’re also rolling out a new way for businesses to sell products and services in Messenger. Payments can now be integrated into messages, making it easy for customers to shop and purchase without leaving the app. Messages with payments utilize industry-leading controls, and financial information is protected with bank-level encryption. As of today, payments will be available for select developers in beta; businesses can apply through the Messenger developer webpage. We expect to roll out this capability more broadly by the end of the year.